THE FIXER’S CELL PHONE BUZZED JUST AS HE SAT BACK IN the Italian leather recliner and began to unwrap his Christmas present—a Scotty Cameron Newport 2 golf putter signed by Tiger Woods, who had once carried it in his bag as a backup. The Fixer had won the Internet auction with a bid of $35,000, which he considered a steal for the club with the flawless German stainless-steel head weighing in at exactly 350 grams.
He’d then allowed his current girlfriend to wrap it up in gaudy Christmas paper “so that you have something under the tree.” The delightful Miss Sherry Maxwell now stood in front of him, watching with a vacuous smile on her pretty face, giggling as if she’d had something to do with the purchase. She did look great in the skimpy Mrs. Claus lingerie she was modeling, so he smiled and said with only a trace of irony, “Thanks, babe, it’s just what I wanted.”
The phone buzzed again from the pocket of his silk robe. “Don’t answer it, Jimmy,” she pleaded. “It’s Christmas.”
Jimmy, he thought. Yes, that’s who I am now. When choosing a name for his current incarnation, he’d gone for forgettable. James, John, and Robert were the most common male names in the United States; he’d settled on Jim as less formal, and therefore even less memorable, than James. Although Smith was the most common last name, there was a catch in that the very commonness of “Jim Smith” might cause someone to note it. Johnson was number two on the list, but Jim Johnson had too much alliteration, so he’d settled on number three, Williams. You are Jim Williams; doesn’t get any more vanilla than that.
He pulled the cell phone out of his pocket and glanced at the caller ID. “Hold on a moment, baby, duty calls,” he said, standing. Patting her bare bottom with the putter as he moved past her, he headed for his office. “I’ll only be a minute.”
“You better not be talking to another girl.” Sherry pouted.
“Never, my love,” the Fixer promised, and winked. “This is all business. You like that necklace, don’t you? Somebody has to pay for it.”
The fingers on Sherry’s right hand shot up to the three-carat diamond solitaire pendant hanging from the platinum chain just within the shadowy cleavage of her generous breasts. She’d hoped for a ring with an even larger stone, but the pendant had been a nice consolation prize. So she smiled and gave him a suggestive wiggle and a toss of her platinum-blond hair before turning back to the small white plastic Christmas tree she’d persuaded him to put up in a corner of the living room of his Fifth Avenue penthouse apartment across from Central Park. Gazing lovingly at the mound of assorted boxes on the floor in front of the tree, containing expensive baubles and items of clothing she’d already plundered, she sighed and smiled to herself, having momentarily forgotten the phone call.
The Fixer shook his head as he opened the door to his office and went inside. Looks like we both got what we wanted this Christmas. She got twenty-five thousand, two hundred and ninety-six dollars’—rounded up—worth of shiny objects. And I woke up to the body of a woman half my age, who wouldn’t give me a second glance if I didn’t have money. And I now own a Tiger Woods Scotty Cameron, which I’ll still be admiring when she’s long gone.
Sherry wasn’t the brightest bulb in the room, but he didn’t mind that so much. In fact, it was better for him if she wasn’t particularly inquisitive—and her curiousity seemed to be limited to what presents he brought home for her when he returned from his “banking” business trips. Nor did she show much more initiative than determining what she was going to wear at any given moment, and even that could take hours to decide. Then again, he hadn’t wooed her after he met her at the gym where she was an aerobics instructor because he wanted a brilliant conversationalist or best friend. A warm, energetic body in bed that also looked good on his arm was all that he required of her. And Sherry delivered.
However, there were signs that it was time to move on. Having found her sugar daddy, she was now thinking of the future. Her future. The little comments about her friends’ weddings and finding “soul mates” and “not getting any younger” were growing more frequent and more pointed. She had not been able to hide her disappointment that morning when he handed her the long rectangular jewelry box, obviously made for a necklace, rather than a little square box with a rounded top that would have contained the engagement ring of her dreams.
The wedding comments he could handle, not that he planned ever to marry her. Why bother? A girl like Sherry would hang on as long as he wanted her to if she thought there was a chance of landing the big fish. But lately, she’d added a new ingredient with the little asides: jealousy. Even though she tried to disguise it with humor or fake pouting, she was always asking him whether he was seeing someone else, and he knew it meant that she was getting worried about his commitment.
A jealous woman could be a dangerous woman, he reminded himself as he took a seat behind his Parnian desk. He paused for a moment to admire the exotic wood inlays and burls of the world’s most expensive “power desk.” Two hundred twenty thousand and worth every penny, he thought. His preference in furniture, like his taste in women, was contemporary, beautiful, and expensive.
The Fixer recognized that Sherry and his other extravagances were counterintuitive to keeping as low a profile as possible. Instead of maintaining a safe, obscure double life as an accountant living in Yonkers with a dowdy, middle-aged wife and a couple of snot-faced kids, driving an SUV and golfing on public courses, he allowed himself to enjoy the fruits of his labors. He liked beautiful girlfriends, expensive furniture, nice toys, dream vacations, membership at the exclusive Trump National Golf Club in Westchester, and, though he generally drove unremarkable sedans when working, he was a collector of rare sports cars.
Most of his life had been spent pulling in a government salary, beginning with his days in the 1980s as a lieutenant in the U.S. Marines Central Intelligence Division, “unofficialy and off the books” training Contra guerrillas to fight the Communist Sandinista government in Nicaragua. When the Iran-Contra affair blew up, he’d left the Corps for the Agency and was reassigned to Cold War games of cat-and-mouse that took him from Latin America to Europe, Asia, and Africa.
As a spook, he’d proved to be particularly adept at cleaning up messes created by other agents or “friends” of the U.S. government, which might mean removing any and all traces of an embarrassing sexual affair by an ambassador or eliminating witnesses to a botched assassination. He became so good at it that he’d earned the in-house moniker of the Fixer.
However, being good had not earned him the kind of lifestyle he coveted. During his time with the Agency, he’d managed to put aside a private stash of funds he’d skimmed from the seized assets of drug dealers and tin-pot dictators. But that was all small potatoes compared with the cash he was raking in now, thanks to his training with the Agency.
When the Cold War ended, the Fixer’s talents were not as much in demand, and in fact, some of his previous dealings were something of an embarrassment as old enemies became friends and vice versa. So he was allowed to “retire” and pursue his avocation of taking care of other people’s problems for a lot of money.
The idea had come to him while he was still employed by the government, and a U.S. senator, considered “friendly” toward the Agency and its budget, had run into a little trouble. He was being blackmailed by one of the male Senate pages who had worked at the Capitol the year before. Apparently, the senator, a “family values” man, had a thing for buggering the young man, now nineteen, in his office in the Russell Senate Office Building after the rest of the staff had gone home for the evening.
The Fixer had contacted the young man, a student at George Washington University, and they arranged to meet one night at a coffee shop in Foggy Bottom. Being a rookie at the blackmailing game, the young man had agreed to allow the senator’s representative, “Bob Johnson,” over to his apartment to “settle up privately.” Excited about the riches Bob was surely carrying in his briefcase, the young man hardly noted the well-built men strolling behind him.
Not until they began to walk down a poorly lit side street and a dark sedan pulled alongside did the young man grow wary. Suddenly, a back door was flung open, and Bob and the young men grabbed him and threw him into the backseat, where another well-built man spun him around and choked him into unconsciousness. The Fixer climbed in next to his victim.
When the young man regained consciousness a few minutes later, he cried out, “Where are you taking me?”
While the well-built man on the other side held the young man’s head up with a painfully tight handful of his hair, Bob leaned close so that he was staring into his victim’s frightened eyes from a foot away. “A little ride up the George Washington Memorial Parkway along the Potomac River. In fact, in a few minutes, we are going to stop the car at a place near the river, and then you and I are going to have a brief conversation. I am going to ask you a question, and I am only going to ask it once. If you want to live, you will answer me immediately and truthfully. I will know if you are lying, and there will be no second chances. Am I clear?”
The next morning, the young blackmailer’s body was discovered by two kayakers, washed up on the shore at a popular access point off the parkway. The assistant medical examiner who performed the autopsy determined that the deceased had died as a result of “accidental drowning.” The AME wrote in his report that the victim’s blood alcohol content was well above DUI limits. He had been drinking in his car—found parked nearby with a half-dozen empty beer cans and a partially drunk bottle of tequila—then walked over to the water, where he’d apparently stumbled and fallen in.
Left out of the report was any notation about the bruise marks around the victim’s neck. And the blood alcohol content was false. The young man had been sober when he died. But the AME, who received a generous wire transfer to an offshore bank account, had been doing this sort of work for the Fixer and others for years, and there was simply not going to be a determination of homicide.
Of course, there was a small amount of press coverage. That couldn’t be helped. A U.S. Senate page getting drunk and tumbling into the Potomac River was going to make the news. But for some reason, the newspaper could not locate the kayakers at the address given to the police. And the Fixer and the public relations experts at the Agency prepped the senator on what to say. He issued a brief statement about “the tragic loss of a fine young man due to the ever-present danger of alcohol in our society.” The senator vowed to introduce a bill aimed at an education program for college-age students on “the dangers of binge drinking” and name it after his former page.
The important thing was that the problem was fixed and the senator duly impressed. When a wealthy friend of the senator needed help out of a sticky situation, the politician had called the Agency and asked for the Fixer. His boss had shrugged and told him the Fixer could take it on as a freelance job if he wanted. The Fixer had then called the wealthy friend, who didn’t bat an eye when, after explaining the problem, he was told it would cost half a million dollars to fix.
It was then that the Fixer began to consider the benefits of free enterprise over his government job, and he’d put in the paperwork and retired. Any concerns about making the leap into the private sector disappeared quickly as he was pleasantly surprised by the amount of business after word got out. It seemed that the more power and money various politicians, CEOs, actors, ministers, and blue bloods had, the bigger the trouble they got into. His initial fee had gone up to a cool million dollars plus expenses just to take on a case. No negotiating. No guarantees. Half the money up front, the rest immediately upon completion, wired into an account in the Cayman Islands.
Of course, some of the money was used to lure former colleagues to join his growing business, though he was always careful to ask permission of the Agency, which sometimes granted permission and sometimes did not. He filled in his other personnel needs with other former law-enforcement, intelligence agency, and military types. He was even allowed access to some of the Agency’s computers and technology. Of course, that meant he still took care of certain jobs for the Agency when the higher-ups wanted something done while keeping a distance from the outcome, just in case some congressional oversight committee came sniffing around.
If the case turned out to be more difficult than normal or the client messed up and created unnecessary obstacles, the price went up, as it had done automatically with this client calling him on Christmas morning.
“Jim Williams” didn’t answer his cell phone, nor did he call the client back on it. Cell conversations were too easy to monitor. Instead, he punched in the caller’s land-line telephone number from his own land line after checking it with the telephone analyzer he’d borrowed from the Agency. Years ahead of any commercial version sold, the analyzer instantaneously detected whether the line was being tapped and even continuously swept his office for any radio-frequency bugs to prevent remote eavesdropping.
The phone rang only once before it was picked up. “Have you seen the Times?” the client asked. His voice sounded as if he was on the razor’s edge of panic.
“Not yet,” the Fixer replied calmly. He reached for the newspaper lying on his desk. “What’s the problem?”
“There’s a story about . . . about our arrangement.”
“What page?”
“Inside . . . with the photograph of that piece of shit Harley Chin.”
“Give me a moment,” the Fixer said. He read the story. “Okay, so it’s a story about the disappearance of a young woman named Rene Hanson, and this . . . Harley Chin is trying to get in the spotlight. But there’s no photograph of the girl, so how do we know this is your friend?”
The Fixer thought the girl would turn out to be one of the thousands of pretty young women who arrived in New York City every year hoping to make it on Broadway or as a model but ended up doing whatever it took to make a living. And if she was pretty enough, and willing, there were plenty of wealthy men—many of them older, like himself—willing to pay for their bodies.
Wherever this girl was from, he’d thought, it might be weeks before her family reported her missing. So he hadn’t worried when a friend at the Agency told him it would be the day after Christmas before he’d get the results of the fingerprints his man had taken from the dead girl, whose body had been taken to a mob-operated farm in New Jersey to be dismembered and fed to the hogs.
Apparently, the fingerprint identification would no longer be necessary. The girl’s name was now in the news. He recognized the names of the missing girl’s parents from the social circles he moved in. They were wealthy and very involved on the political scene, as evidenced by the way this district attorney, Harley Chin, was dancing around like a marionette. He sensed that something had slipped, like a gear in a machine.
The client hesitated long enough before clearing his throat that the Fixer knew the other shoe was about to drop, and his bill was about to rise.
“I forgot to tell you that I—” the client started to say.
“Forgot?”
More hesitation. The bill grew larger. “Well, the truth of the matter is that I knew her real name, Rene . . . um . . . in fact, I knew her before . . . uh . . . before I started seeing her through the VIP Club.”
“How did you know her?”
More throat clearing. More zeros on the end of the check. “She was the daughter of one of my golfing foursome,” the client blurted out. “It just sort of happened—”
“Bullshit!” The Fixer intended the word to hit like a bullet. “You liked the idea that you were screwing your buddy’s daughter. Just a little extra excitement, isn’t that right? Like screwing her in the family home. You’re a sex adrenaline junkie. But unfortunately, this Rene wasn’t just some runaway kid from Ohio. Her family has wealth and influence, and they’re going to want to know what happened to her. Now I have to work even harder, and that’s going to cost the people who are footing this bill a lot of money. I hope you’re worth it.”
“So what do I do now?”
“Get in touch with the escort service, and demand to see ‘Brandy Fox.’ Otherwise, go about your business as usual. At some point, we might need to reach out to this district attorney, Chin. What do you know about him?”
“A real climber,” the client answered. “Stops at nothing to make himself look good. Wants to be state attorney general when the current AG steps down to run for the Senate this spring.”
The Fixer thought about it. “That could be important—ambitious men can be reasoned with.” He hardened his voice. “But it was a mistake not to tell me everything. As I told you in the beginning, there are no guarantees that I can fix every problem, especially if I don’t have all the information I need. If you do that to me again, I will have one of those nice young men you met the other night cut out your tongue for lying to me. Understood?”
After hanging up with the client, the Fixer sat at his desk for a minute, thinking. Then he picked up the telephone and dialed another number. A woman answered.
“Merry Christmas, Amy. How are you doing?” he asked. “Good. I know this is spur of the moment, but I’ll make it worth your while. I need you to take a trip to Mexico for me today. I think Guadalajara. Rob will pick you up and will have the necessary documents, but take your own passport to use on the way home. You’ll be flying back into San Diego and then home. Oh, you’ll need a shoulder-length auburn wig. Bundle up and wear sunglasses so no one gets too good a look at you, though I don’t want you to avoid security cameras. Rob will fill you in when he picks you up. We good? Okay. Thanks, baby, you’ll have a great Christmas present waiting for your return.”
He hung up and placed another call. This time, a man answered.
“Merry Christmas, Rob,” he said. “I know it’s the holiday, but I have to ask you to go pick up Amy Lopez and take a trip to Mexico. Stop by the Jew’s and pick up a passport with Amy’s photo in the name of Rene Hanson. There will be one for you under the name of Enrique Salazar—look the part. I’ll call the Jew and say you’ll be over. Then come here. But first stop by the garage and pick up the car we brought the other night. Apologize to Kate and the kids. Tell her Uncle Jim will make it up to her.”
After a few more calls, the Fixer emerged from his office.
Sherry stuck out her lower lip when she saw him. “Who’s bothering my sweetie pumpkin on Christmas morning?” She pouted, though the suspicion in her voice was clear.
The Fixer smiled. “Just one of my clients calling to wish me a Merry Christmas. Wants to make a change in his investment strategy before the New Year. Oh, and my buddy Rob is going to drop by. He’s headed out of town and wanted to wish us a happy holiday first.”
“Does he have to?” Sherry pouted some more.
I can’t take this much longer, he thought. “It’ll just be for a moment, love bunny. Then I promise, you’ll have me for the rest of the day. And don’t I see another unopened package over there behind the tree?”
Sherry’s eyes lit up, her jealousy momentarily forgotten. She whirled around. “Where? . . . Ooooh, baby, you’re spoiling me!”
“That’s what I’m here for,” the Fixer said, and took a seat. He patted his lap. “Why don’t you sit right here to unwrap it? I might have another surprise for you.”